The art of listening is at the heart of democracy

Monday, March 13, 2017The
art of listening is at the heart of democracy

How
do you encourage people to listen to views that clash with
their own, especially around issues like inequality and
poverty that can be easy to ignore and uncomfortable to
face?

This is crucial to a strong democracy and yet
perhaps the hardest thing we’re asked to do as citizens,
says Massey University politics researcher Dr Emily
Beausoleil.

Dr Beausoleil’s research investigates
“how people come to listen” in regard to socio-economic
inequality – a timely topic for election year with poverty
and homelessness as persistent themes.

She is working
with social policy agencies and “master listeners” from
four professional sectors across New Zealand to explore new
ways for marginalised voices and views to be heard. Her
three-year Marsden-funded project starts at a time when
“listening is in scarce supply,” she says.

“New
Zealand has the fastest growing gap between the rich and
poor of any OECD [Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development] country,” she says. “Yet that fact – and
clear links of high levels of inequality to health issues,
criminality, declining social trust, and economic
instability – hasn’t been enough to move kiwis to push
for meaningful change. When information doesn’t convince
us to listen, what else can make the
difference?”

Central to her study is the idea that
issues of poverty and socio-economic inequality connect us
all as part of our collective responsibility as citizens,
whether or not we experience or witness their negative
effects directly.

The Canadian-born, Wellington-based
academic at Massey’s School of People, Environment and
Planning, says the idea for her study was sparked by her own
sense of wanting to better listen and respond to experiences
and claims that are uncomfortable to hear for those in
positions of privilege.

Poverty’s causes are
complex and hard to communicate

For the first
part of her study, she spoke to government and civic
organisations at the forefront of public policy,
awareness-raising and debate who rely on conventional
methods of engagement and information sharing via websites,
lobby groups, forums, online campaigns and letter-writing.

“The sheer complexity of it – even for those
who care about it – makes it really difficult to
understand and to know how we can affect the issue,” she
says.

Changing the conversation – do the rich
care?

The big challenge for agencies working for
change or to inform others is that “they want to speak to
specific people they can never quite reach. So they often
end up preaching to the converted. A lot of agencies want to
reach the wealthy, those who don’t engage normally with
these issues.”

However, many wealthy are insulated, she
says. “They exist in worlds that are largely
self-affirming. You feel like it’s the world everyone else
lives in and you’re not aware how cocooned you are.”

“A lot of people who work online say you can’t
actually change someone’s mind online. Social media,
blogs, twitter. You can have a sound bite – but one that
shakes and stays with us is hard to achieve.”

Inequality
implicates all of us, she says. “It’s not just a
question of donating to buy a raincoat for a refugee, but
‘how is my position in the world related to this little
boy who needs a refuge and a raincoat?’”

She is
enlisting the help of professionals and experts in
receptivity – people who work in therapy, education,
performance and conflict mediation, and who she refers to as
‘”master listeners”.

She wants to learn from their
more highly developed listening skills and tools for
communicating in subtle, nuanced ways, and see how these
could be applied “in a political context where listening
is required and largely absent among the general
public.”

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